WhatsApp Plus users banned temporarily, app gets discontinued

This is WhatsApp’s way of cracking down on those who steal from them. Since midnight today company has started temporarily banning users who have been using a third-party client (or an altered version of the official app, for the sake of simplicity and added features) known as Whatsapp Plus. The company is now asking users to remove the unofficial app from their devices and install the original version of Whatsapp instead from Play Store. Doing this, however, won’t lift the ban before 24 hours.

The mass banning of user accounts started around 12:00 AM today and though it’s temporary, still it will remain active for 24 hours no matter what you do. Banned users have been complaining about the issue on all major social networks.

The message Whatsapp Plus users are receiving today

Whatsapp Plus is an altered version of original Whatsapp, which has not been developed by Whatsapp Inc. or Facebook Inc. and has been developed by third-party developer(s) known as Rafalense instead. Since quite sometime it has been garnering the attention and popularity among users from a steady pace because some of its exclusive features aren’t available in standard version of Whatsapp, like:

Disabling your “last seen” timestamp but still being able to see when others were online last time

More emojis or emoticons

The ability of editing file sharing options

Themes

The ability of using colors and background images in chat conversations

The ability of increasing the size limit of attached video or audio

And more…

It’s worth pointing out that Whatsapp Plus wasn’t available for download from official Google Play Store. Instead, its links had been posted on other smaller third-party app stores from where users could download and install it on their devices. And if original Whatsapp has been downloaded 700 million times, it should also be mentioned that this unathorized version has also been downloaded more than 35 million times! However, these figures are provided by a third-party app store, so it’ll be tough to say anything about the reliability of these figures.

Now after this thing it seems like the days of Whatsapp Plus are over. As of now their official website is down and the moderator of a development community that supported Whatsapp Plus has posted on Google+ that they’ve received a “cease and desist” letter from Whatsapp, due to which they’re obliged to remove all the download links of the app and delete the community supporting it as well.

Whats App Plus – Discontinued

So bye bye Whatsapp Plus, your users will miss you. And kudos to the guys of Whatsapp, who turned around the popularity and fortunes of an app that was continuing since last 2 years in a single day!